The intelligent use of spreadsheets, combined with the application of the 80ᚼ rule will help to achieve the foregoing and more. One does not need any expert to start doing these things today. Just take the decision to start keeping daily, accurate records and commit to analysing them. You'll be surprised to find that you will soon become much more aware of how you're doing and what aspects of your business you should focus on more to get better returns for your efforts _ and you will be able to confidently supply verifiable/authentic financial data to back up any claims you make about your business performance to bankers or prospective investors.

Variable Costs Control/Reduction was a strategy that worked extremely well for the company. Most memorable for me as a brewer, was the manner in which huge monetary savings/profit gains were made by successfully implementing variable cost reduction initiatives. For instance, a brewing ingredient switch was made to a more readily available local alternative which was many times cheaper, resulting in phenomenal savings and progressively increasing profit earnings even though the price of beer produced was not raised. This practice was routinely applied across the brewing and packaging processes in line with a well thought out plan.

For instance if a company had five drink brands in the market but notices that Brand A, which has a profit margin of at least twice the others is in greatest demand, they could (a) focus production efforts on that brand, so that more bottles go out to trade (b) Apply Best Practice/Continuous Improvement initiatives that would result in lower costs of producing each bottle of Brand A so that even though the market price remains fixed, the company is able to earn increasing profit margins per bottle.